Ed disses me for quoting from Mother Jones, but that's where the story
is, so...


http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/20...-texas-miracle



I think it's obvious that there are lots of openings to criticize both
Texas' economic performance and Rick Perry's role in it. For one thing,
the Texas virtues that Perry likes to emphasize are actually common to
lots of low-tax, low-service states in the Sun Belt and the South. As Ed
Kilgore says, "Eventually, someone will draw attention to the fact that
if Perry’s low-tax, low-services, corporate-subsidizing policies really
were an economic cure-all, similar conditions should have made states
like Alabama and Mississippi world-beating dynamos years ago." This is
going to make it hard for Perry to make a convincing case that taxes and
regulation and general business friendliness are really behind his
state's performance. What's more, there are lots of obvious chinks in
the Texas armor: its poor rate of health care coverage, its high poverty
rate, its weak educational system, and so forth.

And yet…jobs! It's still the case that Texas has created lots and lots
of jobs and has attracted a huge influx of new residents thanks to those
jobs. No one's putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to move to
Houston, after all. No matter how many hits Perry takes over his
simplistic explanations, and no matter how many sophisticated arguments
his opponents make about the emperor's lack of clothes, it's still the
case that Texas has created lots of jobs. All Perry has to do is repeat
that until his face turns red while tossing out some folksy mockery of
the eggheads and bureaucrats and their ivory-tower Harvard
counterarguments. After all, who are you going to believe, all those
East Coast twerps who have never run a company in their lives, or your
own eyes?

This is going to be a tough row to hoe for Perry's detractors. It's
worth going after it, but in the end, Texas' record on jobs is good
enough and real enough that Perry will probably be able to brush off
most of the criticism. The Texas Miracle is going to be one of his
strongest calling cards.

His weakness for Texas-style crony capitalism, however, might be a real
problem. I suspect we're going to be hearing a lot more about that as
the oppo teams start to seriously gear up.